Space

In about a third of the time it would have taken other NASA Mars rovers, Perseverance recently navigated its way through a field of boulders more than 1,700 feet wide (about a half-kilometer). While planners map out the rover’s general routes, Perseverance managed the finer points of navigating the field, nicknamed “Snowdrift Peak,” on its own, courtesy of AutoNav, the self-driving system…

Three billion years ago, amid one of the last wet periods on Mars, powerful debris flows carried mud and boulders down the side of a hulking mountain. The debris spread into a fan that was later eroded by wind into a towering ridge, preserving an intriguing record of the Red Planet’s watery past. Now, after three attempts, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has reached the ridge…

By the time they were over, a series of massive algal blooms along the west coast of Florida in 2020 would be linked to some 2,000 tons of dead marine life around Tampa Bay. The human costs were stark, too, including a double-digit increase in asthma cases in Sarasota and Pinellas counties, and estimated losses of around $1 billion across economic sectors from tourism to fisheries. Earth-orbiting…

NASA will host a news conference at 1 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Sept. 6, to discuss the agency’s upcoming Psyche mission, which will be its first to visit a metal-rich asteroid. Riding along with Psyche is a laser transceiver for NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration. The media briefing will air live on NASA Television, the NASA app, Facebook, X, YouTube, and on…